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Yes, it is predictions time. My predictions for 2006 are on the way, but before we get to that, I thought I'd share an interesting set of forecasts laid out the other night by Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service newsletter. Mark's audience includes a wide range of the most influential venture capitalists, investors, and CEOs in the tech space, and I find his insights to be mostly on target.

The predictions were unveiled at a subscriber dinner, held at the swankyif slightly wornWaldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan. About 65 tech luminaries ate, drank, and listened, and then debated the issues well into the wee hours of the night.

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Anderson started his remarks by lambasting the current political environment, global-warming deniers, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (author of The World Is Flat), and journalists in general. He was particularly critical of current inflation rates as reported by the federal government, zeroing in on excluded energy costs; he estimates the real inflation rate at "5 to 7 percent" when you add in energy. He also explained that it "takes a long time for energy to work through the supply chain," and thus that he expects overall costs to rise as the full impact of the rise in energy prices is absorbed.

He then moved on to the general good news. Surprisingly, he latched onto high oil prices as "the best thing that has happened in the last few years." In Anderson's view, high oil prices will lead to more research into alternative energy, and he described "expensive, infinite energy" as the best possible outcome, since a consistent price would be preferably to wide swings in energy costs. Anderson also touted a worldwide explosion of consumers, predicting that 300 to 500 million new consumers will enter the global market over the next ten years, more than the U.S. population. "I don't think anyone's ready for that," he cautioned.

"It's the best time in a lifetime to make new companies," he advised. "Go out, get the money, find things that haven't been tried, fail twice, and then succeed the third time." He pointed to amazing new technologies as offering tremendous opportunity, including protein-based biological diagnostics, integration of biological and computational technologies, photographic storage, and biomimicry (emulating biological structures to solve vexing problems). Anderson specifically mentioned Tulane University, which has reinvented its engineering department as a new Science and Engineering discipline that will expose students to biology along with traditional physics and mathematical models.Continue reading...